


That Which Has Been Your Delight

by LittleObsessions



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Developing Relationship, Established Relationship, F/M, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-10-02 10:05:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17262260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleObsessions/pseuds/LittleObsessions
Summary: “You told me you cling on every day. For what, if it isn’t to be loved? We’ve no guarantee of getting home. All that’s guaranteed to us is the next minute. "In the seventh year, the crew face a challenge none of them could have imagined.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ariella884](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariella884/gifts).



> Thank you, as always, to Mia Cooper for the beta.
> 
> This is for Ariella, who posited this prompt months ago. I will post updates are regularly as I can, as it's mostly finished.

 

 

“When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”   **\- Khalil Gibran**

* * *

**Prologue**

She wants to tell him she understands; she understands the taste of the pain, the way it is wrapping his body in a shroud too, how it is taking him in the same way it has taken the woman he loved.

 How it feels like dying, but there is no mercy and no end.

But she doesn’t. Instead she stands there, her breath catching in her chest, her mind racing back into her own past. Selfish, she tells herself, suicidal.

  _Your job is not to crumble, your job is to stay in this moment._

Chakotay is on his knees beside Paris, his hands frantically tracing over B’Elanna’s lifeless, scorched body. Paris is screaming, a sound so primal it is vibrating into her very bones.

 Her name flutters onto Kathryn’s tongue as Tom’s scream becomes silent, a noiseless, agonised wail.

 “B’Elanna,” she says, the name heavy and dense in the silence of the transporter room.

 “Kathryn,” Chakotay gasps. “Sickbay.”

 But Janeway knows what too late looks like. She’s stared it in the face before.

 


	2. Day 1

**Chapter 1 - Day 1**

Silence. The dense, cold intensity of it is already eating into her bones. Gnawing, burying deep and unearthing a silence within her that she has forgotten she once clung to.

 She hasn’t felt like this in a very long time. But she recognises it with pinpoint accuracy.

 Her breaths come as a challenge, each one tightening her ribs, withdrawing more from her than it gives. She slumps into the couch, limbs weak and boneless.

 And the first thing she thinks – because even allowing herself to think has been a treachery she cannot allow – is that she wants her mother.

 If she tries hard enough she can feel her mother’s birdlike arms, the soft skin and heat of her embrace. The whispering acceptance of every mistake, of every loss. The veneration of success. But it is so hard to recall those memories now, they are yellowing at the edges, curling inevitably into oblivion.

 They are being overwritten by days like these; more loss, more pain, more loneliness.

 She curls forward, stretching her body out slowly, and unfolds herself prone onto the couch. She wants to be swallowed by the softness, and cast into a forgetfulness where she does not need to face this.

 The silence she’s aware of is only broken by the memory of Tom’s hideous scream, which intermittently pushes itself to the front of her grief-blank consciousness. It had ricocheted round the greyness of sickbay, shattering the pretence.

 Dead. B’Elanna is dead.

 She had ordered the doctor to sedate Tom - “just for a few hours” - and the look in Chakotay’s eyes had given her nowhere to run. Buying time was one of her most utilised, but least subtle, tricks, and his blank disbelief had been writ plain all over his face.

 Tom will be awake soon, she reminds herself. And she compels herself to lift her body off of the couch. She should be there when he rouses; feet away from the corpse of his wife.

 She knows for the first few milliseconds after he wakes the world will feel right, and then memory will perform its thankless duty and his world will tilt on its axis and throw him into the depths of a pain so prodigious that he will panic that he’ll never draw breath again.

 She knows this like she knows the contours of her own body, or the wood trails of Indiana. She knows it like she knows every hum and song of _Voyager_.

 She knows grief, but she has no words for it.

 

**__0__ **

His fingers are moving of their own accord, flittering discordantly – like a child sitting at a piano, making chaos rather than music – over the planes of his own thighs. He can’t seem to rest them.

 A vision quest is calling to him, but he doesn’t have the strength for it. And he does not want to leave Tom.

 Tom whom he used to hate. Tom whom he grudgingly grew to respect, then like, and then slowly love.

 Six years of quiet admiration have become full blown pity in the last few hours.

 And something else, of course.

 He loves (loved) her like a little sister. She reminded him of his sister Awena – dry and feisty and fighting the world – who had been lost with the rest of his family, a victim of the Cardassians.

 But B’Elanna was just a victim of accident, of chance. Of a freak plasma storm and a set of calamitous circumstances. He tells himself this. He has to.

 He couldn’t have done any more.

 And yet here it is, another loss he gets to notch up. Another person he loves taken from him by time and fate.

 This time he isn’t angry – not yet, at least -, he’s just sad. It’s not particularly descriptive but it serves its purpose perfectly.

 Loss lives in his skin.

 The Doctor is sitting lifelessly behind his station, staring into nowhere. He doesn’t even look up when Kathryn comes in. Doesn’t ask her a grating question or offer an absurd solution. He just sits there, staring.

 Chakotay doesn’t move to stand either, and he knows she doesn’t expect him to. She has been crying; her face is red, and there are tiny flecks of make-up gathered around her eyes. He hates Kathryn’s tears, because they are so hard fought for and rare.

 It has been so long since they have spoken, so long since she’s gone beyond anything that isn’t defined by parameters, that he doesn’t expect her words. And certainly not the ones she utters.

 “What will we do?”

 They trip out on a breath, suppressing a sob. There is no command structure in the question, not even an expectation of a solution. Instead it’s a plea.

 He takes her hand.

 “We should wake him. We’re only delaying the inevitable.”

 She takes a moment to nod.

 “Seal the doors please, Doctor,” she says softly. “And give me the hypospray.”

 She traces her fingers over Tom’s brow, sweeps his blond hair back. He’s only a decade or so younger than her, but she could well be a mother, he thinks, worrying over the pain of her beloved child. It’s a metaphor that isn’t a giant leap from the reality of the feelings he knows she has for Tom Paris, her reclamation project. The tenderness of her fingers as she traces his pained forehead speaks of an affection even Chakotay hadn’t quite gotten the measure of. It comforts him deeply, reminding him that somewhere deep inside the Kathryn who started this journey is still – in part at least – with them.

As she moves her finger to Tom’s collar Chakotay slides his hand into Tom’s open one, prepared to restrain him if need be. He hopes there will be no need.

 The hiss of the hypo as it is administered makes him draw breath.

 

**_0 _**

He is dreaming about the holodeck. It’s a strange dream; a diorama of _Captain Proton_ , and _Sandrine’s_ , and even the World War 2 programme that the Hirogen hijacked and altered. The only thread weaving through the mismash of scenes and recollections is B’Elanna; belly full and prodigious, fit to burst, weeping inconsolably. No matter what he does, he cannot console her. Even the mention of their child makes her weep. And the helplessness is wildly terrifying.

 He rolls over to hold her in their bed, and when she wakes he’ll tell her about the dream and she’ll laugh and slap him lightly on the arm and say “Calm down Flyboy. I don’t cry.” And he’ll lovingly pat her slowly blooming abdomen, and they’ll laugh.

 But when he rolls, he encounters nothing but air, and it is then that the milliseconds of perfection shatter into a thousand fragments.

 She is dead. His wife is dead.

 A cry he has no agency over tears out of his throat in the same instant that his eyes spring open. He bounces up, but a solid hand on his chest pushes him back, and the gentle squeeze of another in his own pulls him into the moment.

 “Tom, I...”

 The Captain’s words disappear, like everything else has. He stares at her, hoping she will tell him this can be fixed. That the horror of hours before – the stench of charred skin, the blood on his hands, Chakotay’s intense desperation, his wife’s wilting breaths – can be erased.

 But she just stands there.

 He turns to Chakotay; equally helpless, his dark eyes huge with agony, and Tom doesn’t know what to say or what to do. He has never seen Chakotay so helpless looking

 “She’s dead.”

 He says it just to be sure. Quietly, just on the right side of a statement, just to check that this is not imaginary. That he is, in fact, facing the most terrifying moment of his entire life.

 Janeway just nods.

 “I want to see her.”

 He doesn’t really, he doesn’t want to see what remains of her. He can recall what her marred body looked like, and he doesn’t want to have to confront that again.

 But he thinks it’s the right thing to say, because he’s suddenly numb, like he’s been plunged into a pool of ice water. At first it hurts like hell, then there is numbness. Nothing.

 Nothing.

 The Doctor pulls back a sheet on the biobed three away from him. He hadn’t noticed it before. He stays on his own bed for a moment as Chakotay moves around to stand on the other side of him, as if he might need the command team to carry him over. Like an invalid.

 He isn’t ruling it out. He doesn’t know if anything will work properly after this. And this grief feels more than paralysing.

 He just stares at her profile; her dark hair, the ridges on her forehead, the peak of her nose. The concave of her chest, the convex of her belly. So still. He focuses on her chest, everything logical telling him there will be no movement, while everything emotional tells him that if he looks long enough he can will her to breathe. But his will is not strong enough.

 “Is she...is she cold?”

 Everyone is still, afraid to answer the question. To his surprise, it is Chakotay who answers, after Janeway looks at him with such distress that it occurs to Tom he isn’t the only one who has lost someone here.

 But that concept exists entirely in the abstract.

 “She has to be. So you can say goodbye to them.”

 ‘Them’. Of course, he’s losing – lost – everything. Past and future.

 “Oh, okay,” he says dumbly, stumbling off the bed, where Janeway catches and steadies him.

 Everything is so quiet.

 The space between the bed and him feels like a chasm. Tentative steps mean he takes forever to get to her; and he is terrified of what he is going to see there. But she is clean, and intact, and nothing but a bruise on her temple betrays the brutal damage her body incurred.

 “She looks perfect.”

No one answers him. And the silence means there is enough room for the horror of what is before him to burst into the foreground. Another cry rips through him as he scoops her lifeless body into his arms.


	3. Day 3

**Day 3**

“We need to move her...” she says into the quiet. “We need to move.”

 He knows exactly what she means. She can see it on his face. They have been at all-stop since B’Elanna’s accident, hanging in the blank space. Hanging in the pause.

 “Another coffee?”

 She shakes her head; sleep is hard enough, without the added difficulty of caffeine.

 “Something stronger instead?” she asks, looking for a sleeping aid.

 He nods and makes his way to the replicator. She can’t remember the last time he left her side and everything that she’s done in these last two days, she’s done with him a step away from her.

 She had forgotten what that felt like.

 “Harry and Neelix said they’d take the nightshift with Tom, Beta has the Bridge,” he hands her a generous glass of whiskey. “So you should get to sleep.”

 “I can’t,” she sighs. “And neither can you. Because there is so much unfinished.”

 “I don’t know how we can make him move at a pace that isn’t his own,” Chakotay takes a giant gulp of his own drink. “No one is ready to say goodbye.”

 “We never are,” she mumbles, knowing all too well that a comment like that will only make him wonder what she means, yet she is unable to stymie the urge to say it.

 There is a pause, and she already knows what he is about to suggest. She gives him the time to work up the courage; setting her feet up on the table and taking another mouthful.

 “You’re the only one who knows how he feels, losing a spouse in a tragic accident is very...specific,” he says softly, already cowed and awaiting his rebuke.

 “I agree.”

 She watches surprise flit across his face.

 She wants to tell him that fighting with him is the last thing she wants to do under these circumstances.. That she wants to crawl under his skin, safe within the love she knows he has for her. She wants to consume him, to apologise for everything. And that feeling is more disconcerting than her typical urge to push him away. And she wants, even more terrifyingly, to admit her love to him.

 A love that she is too frightened to act on, because she knows she could not stand the loss of it.

 She wants to plough right through every carefully defined parameter she’s ever set in place.

 And that is what petrifies  her.

 “You do?” he asks, eyebrow raised.

 “You think I haven’t thought about it? About putting what is an entirely personal pain out there for his consumption? I know, at least, he would feel less adrift.”

 She takes another drink.

 “But I am selfish,” she continues. “And I cannot share it with him. I can’t do that, it will take too much of me.”

 “You told me, once,” he reminds her gently, and the fleeting memory of that evening on the holodeck almost hurts.

 It isn’t accusatory, but she feels like it is.

 “ _You_ are different,” she nearly snaps.

 And his silence is enough to tell her that he doesn’t want to challenge that conception of him, or that concept of their increasingly strained relationship.

 “It might make it easier on Tom. Just think about it,” he suggests, downing the Scotch and setting the glass on the table.

 “Chakotay,” she doesn’t even think about what she is about to say. She can’t, she can only act out of desperate vulnerability. “The last time I slept properly was when we were stranded on that planet.”

 The implication is not lost on him. He nods and sits down beside her, where she rests her head on his shoulder, and closes her eyes.

 She refuses to allow herself to think of the hope she knows will inevitably be blooming in his chest. She is not unaware of her selfishness, but she doesn’t know how to be anything else either. Just now she needs too much.

**_-0-_ **

She looks peaceful when she sleeps, lines gone, her face neutral. He touches a lock of her hair, shining in the light of the stars she loves so much. She’s shed her uniform jacket, and her tank has come loose from her pants, so an inch of the skin of her abdomen is visible. He can still taste her; the salt and linen of her skin, the way it used to shiver under his fingers. When he’s really crumbling, this is what he thinks of. He thinks of their three months together, and a capitulation that was all the sweeter for its brevity.

He wants to tell her that the thought of losing her makes him weep, makes tears well in his eyes. But she does not want his words, so he buries his nose in her shorter hair, and tries to conjure up the memories of when she was just Kathryn; soil under her nails, coffee in her hand, hair loose and moving in the breeze.

 When she was his.

 In her sleep she turns, shuffling across her sheets to move closer to him. She slings her arm around his waist, and presses her face into his chest. Nervously, afraid in spite of the invitation, he rubs his hand over her back.

 “Thank you,” she whispers softly, eyes still closed.

 He simply kisses her temple.

 

**_ _0_ _ **

He has forgotten what it feels like to feel. The nothingness is comforting, not at all painful. He doesn’t know what it will turn into. He’s taking every moment a breath at a time, because he strongly suspects that every one will be his last.

 Harry is watching him from the corner of the morgue, and Neelix is sitting at the station by the door. Their silence is disconcerting. Generally, they fill every space with noise.

 “You should sl-”

 “I can’t,” he interrupts Harry. “I’m not tired. I’m not leaving her.”

 “We can stay with her, just until you sleep,” Neelix says softly.

 “I’ll stay with them,” he repeats, feeling pressed by their insistence.

 “You might feel a bit -”

 He stands up, clenching his fists. He doesn’t understand why they keep insisting on sleep, or food. Nothing can fix this. Nothing can fill the void that has been blown apart inside him.

 “Okay Tom, it’s okay,” Neelix says softly.

 “I can’t just leave her,” he explains. “I’m not going to do that.”

 He sees them exchange looks, but he knows it’s because they don’t understand. He knows the Captain wants to press on, to have B’Elanna’s service and move ahead and get them home. But she doesn’t understand that home is here, in this morgue, and it doesn’t matter what the Captain thinks is right. Because he knows, and he cannot leave her.

 “I wonder if she’d just drop us off, somewhere, you know?”

 They look at him as if he has sprouted another head, failing to see the simplicity in his plan. It’s the only solution he can see to the Captain’s problem, really. And it makes perfect sense.

 “We’re not going to do that, Tom,” Harry says gently, moving towards him.

 “Well I’m not leaving her. I’m not going anywhere without the both of them.”

 They don’t answer him.

 


	4. Day 5

**Day 5**

 

The ship is still painfully quiet, too quiet, and it’s starting to make her feel smothered. The Mess is almost perfectly silent – punctuated only by the clatter of cutlery or the beeping of the replicator. She’s lost count of the coffees, and the days they’ve been here.

Neelix pours her another.

“How are you Captain?” he asks lightly, setting the pot down. 

She looks at her morale officer, and her heart almost bursts with gratitude. She doesn’t imagine the crew could have survived the last few days without him. He has consoled, cajoled, entertained them through the pause. He has nursed Tom’s tears, and Carey’s, and Ayala’s. And he still has the energy to care for her.

 “Sit down Neelix. Take a few moments,” she looks at his glazed eyes. “You look so tired.”

“I am. Truth be told, I am not sleeping very well.” 

“I don’t think anyone is,” she answers, lifting her coffee cup. “I’m stuck, and I don’t know what to do next.” 

“Have you asked the Commander?”

She smiles a little, “He’s better than me with these things, isn’t he?”

Neelix shakes his head, “I don’t know about that. But he seems to be the only person Tom will listen to just now. If he will even listen to anyone.”

“I - “ Her throat suddenly tightens around the revelation.

She wants to tell Neelix she never got to say goodbye to Justin, or to her father. Starfleet took their bodies away – after recovery from the glacier – and she had only seen them once, through a glass partition. It had been so impersonal, so sterile.

If she could have held his body, she doubted she would have let go either. 

Instead she says, “I will speak to him, or to Chakotay.”

She makes her way to the morgue and hears the tell-tale sound of angry disagreement as soon as the doors slide open. The Doctor is perched on his desk, watching as Chakotay paces in front of Tom. 

“I am begging you to let her rest.”

“How dare you. This isn’t about you, or your fucking spirits. She is my wife, that is my child -” 

“And she was my friend,” Chakotay turns on him, roaring it at the top of his voice. He is so angry he is shaking. “And you are denying her the peace she deserves.” 

“If you’d taken better care of her on that planet, I wouldn’t be denying her anything.”

 Kathryn has to pounce in front of Chakotay’s fist to stop it colliding with Tom’s tear stained face.

 

**_ _0_ _ **

**__ **

He can’t believe it’s come to this. That Kathryn Janeway is pushing him to the floor and holding back Tom at the same time. This is not who any of them are, and yet this is what grief does.

“Chakotay,” she pleads. “Get out of here.”

He scrambles backwards and stands, and the cover of rage lifts and he is horrified as he looks on a weeping, helpless Tom. Tom is leaning so heavily on Kathryn he wonders how she is still standing, as both of his arms are wrapped around her and he is sobbing wildly into her shoulder. His breaths are heaving through his body.

“It’s killing me. I can’t breathe. I can’t do this. I can’t do this,” he just keeps repeating the same thing, and the fact he is breaking into pieces in front of them is lost in the horror of the moment. 

She holds his head to her, murmurs her comfort into his hair, but her eyes are on Chakotay. Helpless and pleading. 

“He hasn’t slept in five days,” the Doctor says. “He is on the edge of breaking down.” 

She nods and turns away as he pushes another hypo into Tom’s neck. Chakotay steps forward and catches him just before he slams into the floor. 

It is the least he can do, since he was the one who triggered the fall.

 

**_ _0_ _ **

**__ **

His dreams have caught up this time. He’s dreaming that he’s in the boxing ring – something he doesn’t enjoy – and he’s up against Chakotay. Janeway is on the sidelines, holding B’Elanna’s hand. But she isn’t his wife, not really, she’s an animated corpse – all gashes and blood, her stomach torn apart, blood pouring from every wound. Every time he tries to climb the ropes to get to her, Chakotay lands him with a thump so extreme that it sends him reeling backwards. And he looks up, and Janeway and B’Elanna just stare, motionless.

 

He wants so desperately to wake up, to escape the incessant blows and the glazed, white eyes of the woman he loves.


	5. Day 8

**Day 8**

 

 

* * *

She wakes up alone, for the first time in the days between then and now. She sits up, shrugs on her dressing gown, and looks around in the darkness of her quarters. The chronometer tells her it is 2 am.

“Computer,” he throat is dry. “Locate Commander Chakotay.”

 “Commander Chakotay is on the holodeck.”

 She rubs her hands over her eyes and tries to shake off the exhaustion that has taken up permanent residence in her bones. Now she has found rest, when he is there at least, she could sleep forever. It would be easier than facing Tom and ordering him to accept the release and burial of his wife’s body.

 After the altercation the evening before, she had ordered Harry and Chakotay and Neelix to carry Tom to his quarters. They had settled him on the bed and set up a vigil, with the Doctor administering sedatives when he stirred.

 She knows the hope that somehow rest will cure the increasingly worrying nature of his behaviour is a slim one. Where she’d found depression after Justin’s death, she knows Tom is finding pretense as his comfort.

 It is terrifying to witness.

 She takes a few moments to make her mind up, then she changes and slips out into the quiet of the corridor. The ship is still eerily silent, and the ungodly hour means it’s even more so. She meets no one on the way to the holodeck, and she’s quietly glad.

 She overrides his command and enters the holodeck, to be greeted by a night full of stars. There is little else in the programme, and he is sitting on the edge of a cliff. At first she doesn’t think he hears her, his back is turned and he is facing the infinite sky. Then she realises that he is so racked with grief that he is consumed by that alone. His large body is shaking with it, and he is gripping the edges of the cliff as if he is about to topple off.

 She finds herself running, and without thinking, throwing herself into his back.

 “Oh, oh Chakotay...”she wraps herself around him.

 “I..I-” his words are lost, consumed by his tears.

 “You don’t have to explain,” she moves round to the front of him, and he slides back a little to make room for her. She doesn’t ask before she climbs into his lap, and he pulls her so closely he squeezes the breath out of her.

 “He needs help and I attacked him...I feel so guilty.” Another giant sobs rips through him.

 She takes his face in her hands.

“Look at me, look at me Chakotay...”she tries to focus his attention on her. “You are angry.”

 “I am not,” he weeps, though she knows he’s lying.

 “You are, and it’s okay. Because anger and resentment are what happens when someone we love dies.”

 He has held it all for so long; offset against her moments of instability, of self-hatred, that she sometimes forgets he absorbs every moment of pain in the same way. That for him it is bigger and sorer, and that he feels he has to be brave in the face of all of their trials.

 He pulls her to him again, muttering incoherently into her hair. She holds him until his sobs calm, and eventually abate. But he doesn’t move from holding her and nor does she expect him to. In fact, if it weren’t for every pressing matter that she has to attend to, she would happily stay wrapped in his arms. Here it is safe and she doesn’t have to think of anything beyond where their skin touches.

 But of course she must, because if she doesn’t all of her control will slip from her fingers.

 She slides out of his lap once she knows he is calm, but doesn’t leave his side. She takes his hand in hers, and wraps his fingers within her own.

 “This can’t go on,” he mumbles, swiping his hands over his exhausted eyes.

 “I know,” she agrees, pulling in a breath. “I’ll try to reason with him.”

 He looks at her sideways. 

“You don’t need to d-”

 “I think I do,” she says simply. “My own personal history aside, I am the only person with the authority...” she swallows, tasting the icy practicality of her own sentiments, “to order him.”

 She sees horror, however briefly, crossing his face.

 “It won’t come to that,” she says quietly, more for her own benefit than his.

 “No,” he says gently. “I’m sure it won’t.”

 

**_ _0_ _ **

**__ **

He crawls into his own bed for the first time in days, and when he closes his eyes he realises he misses the hum of the warpcore and the noise of the ship as she ploughs headlong through space. The silence is painful; eating away at the life of the ship. He wants it to end.

 He tries to still his mind, but images of B’Elanna keep painting themselves every time he clears the canvas blank.

 He can recall, with perfect clarity, the first time he met her. She had started a row with a Ferengi on a ropey out-posting in the Imtar system, and he’d had to dock the the _Valjean_ there because he’d narrowly missed blowing his entire crew to pieces when their helmsman-cum-engineer had decided to tamper with their already cantankerous warp core.

 Recalling her disgusted face, the first time he proudly showed her the _Valjean_ , genuinely makes him laugh aloud into the silence of his lonely bedroom.

 And when he laughs he realises it’s the first time in days the silence hasn’t felt smothering.

After he had introduced her to his ship, they had gotten abysmally drunk on rum and they’d discovered they had quite a bit in common between Starfleet and anger and their righteous indignation.

Initially, he’d even suspected B’Elanna had been attracted to him. Not that he ever would have been okay with her acting on it; he viewed her as a little sister and wanted to protect her more than he ever wanted to take advantage. But it had been flattering to have someone with as much fire in her belly as B’Elanna had, finding him desirable.

 Of course that had withered for her, and he’d been glad of her relationship with Tom – however he might have felt about Tom in the beginning. He knew they were a good match; Tom made her laugh, and put humour where there used to be fury, and she had been an anchor for Tom in a life that had cast him adrift.

 And at any rate, Chakotay had never wanted to pursue a relationship if that relationship wasn’t with his Captain.

 And on that thought he can’t possibly linger, because things are already miserable enough. But he can’t help himself. The last few days have unleashed feelings he thought he’d finally managed to rein in, and they have swollen out of his control to the point that when she had made it clear he should retire to his own quarters tonight, he’d been offended.

The computer sounds through his ruminations, cutting them short, but he doesn’t have time to answer the door before she has let herself in and he meets her in the sitting room.

 She is in full uniform, hair set, make up perfect, and he doesn’t need to observe all of this to know something has shifted. It seems his moment in the holodeck had been a watershed for her too.

 He wants to be sore for Tom, and angry over B’Elanna, so the fact he is focussing on this loss is uniquely painful. The silence, he knows, will go soon. Life will resume, and the distance they’ve managed to bridge in the last few days will be set back in motion, the coil unwinding them to either ends of the chasm they’ve chosen to quarry in the last few years.

“I...” she falters, and the sudden fear in eyes makes him realise he may have miscalculated. “Can I have a drink? I know I told you to sleep, I’m sorry but -”

 He stalls her speech by pushing a whiskey into her hand. She looks up at him with unreadable eyes, and then takes a drink.

“That’s okay, sleep was proving difficult.”

“I don’t know how to begin,” she says. “I don’t know how to speak to him.”

 He touches her shoulder, grasping softly. 

“Just speak to him, tell him the truth,” he slides his hand over her shoulder, and up to cradle her cheek. “Tell him you know what it feels like to believe you’re coming apart.” 

Her tears land in the curve between his finger and his thumb, hot and sudden.

 “You have the power to help him,” he continues, knowing she will need every ounce of that power to get through speaking to Tom. “And you want to help him, because you know how it feels.”

 She opens her eyes, and they sparkle with agony and with the reflection of the stars she so loves. There are universes in her eyes, he thinks, and she has so many stories she still has to tell him. He doesn’t want to lose those stories. A voice in his head tells him to kiss her, to lean forward and close that gap and hopefully mend all of the hurt that has gone before.

 But he doesn’t, because he wouldn’t breach her trust like that. And everything between them is so delicate. 

“I couldn’t go through it again,” she whispers, turning her cheek into his palm, her lips lingering there as her words die against his skin.

 She is alluding to a conversation they had, so long ago it doesn’t feel real now.

  _You remind me of Justin_ , she had said. _And that is why this cannot happen._

“I know,” he breathes, so quietly he wonders if the words will come out at all. “I know this is goodbye.”

 She closes her eyes, and more tears spill from under her lashes, and he wishes so desperately that he could take every moment of pain, humiliation, and agony to himself, so she would be able to see what she could have if only she weren’t so blindingly afraid.

 “I want to go home,” she sobs, so pitifully that it trumps all of the agony he’s witnessed in her before; it beats the _Equinox_ and that Devore alien and every violation she’s ever suffered. “I want this to be over.”

 He hears, too, what she doesn’t say. _I want you._ And he supposes it has to be enough for him, because she has made it be enough for her.

 

**_ _0_ _ **

**__ **

He knows, instantly, why Janeway is here. She’s all business, even though she’s trying not to be. He’s geared for battle, ready to fight her on this. He’s prepared logical arguments, to his mind, though he suspects they’re just pleas. So when she gently asks Harry to leave, and then sits down on the edge of the bed, he suddenly feels on the back foot.

 He makes to sit up, but she motions with a hand and he slumps back against his pillows. She studiously avoids looking at the crib at their bedside, and it’s funny because he’s been doing that too.

 “Tom,” she touches his hand, “can I tell you something?”

 And so she does; she tells him about Tau Ceti Prime, and about how the ice was so cold that she couldn’t catch her breath, and how everything felt like burning and drowning at the same time. She tells him that her fingers shook so violently, and her mind was so numb, that she couldn’t operate the transport quickly enough. She tells him that her fiancé and her father’s last moments are cut into her consciousness, etched with a blunt knife. That their pale, terrified faces wake her up each morning and put her to sleep each night. That she was so paralysed with terror that she could not choose, so she did not choose.

 That she felt like a ghost afterwards, that she begged every power – omnipotent and human – to find a way to bring her peace. That she wasn’t allowed to hold their bodies, to say goodbye to the man she loved and the man who had fathered her.

 And that she had to claw her way back to life. And how some days, even now, she is barely hanging on by her fingertips.

 When her story ends she is still sitting on the edge of his bed, but her hand is in his, and he is reaching up to brush her tears away, though he knows he should attend to his own.

“You’re not alone,” she promises. “And you won’t be. I’ll be here for you.”

He doesn’t doubt it. In that moment he thinks he loves and admires Kathryn Janeway in a way he didn’t know he could. And that he is so grateful to her for baring herself in such a colossal way.

“I don’t know if I can say goodbye to her,” he says finally, trying to explain. “If I say goodbye to her, I’m saying goodbye to everything.”

“You think that, you will think that for a long time. But you’re not, you’re just...taking the first step to letting her be.”

It’s a simple statement; let her be. Let it go. Let her rest.

“I tried to cling on to them,” she continues. ”It nearly killed me, Tom. It will kill you too.”

“I want it to,” he admits, sobs threatening to swallow his words.

She reaches forward and pulls his head against her chest chest, and he sobs like a child. And he wants his mother so badly in that moment, and he wants B’Elanna and their child he’ll never know, and he wants all of the things he has lost.

“I know you do, I understand.”


	6. Day 16

**Chapter 5 - Day 16**

Janeway feels Chakotay’s eyes on her, lingering throughout the entire speech. The Mess is so full that there is hardly any room to move, and she doesn’t expect it any other way. And Harry is so faithful, and so purely wonderful, to Tom, that she remembers yet again just how incredible her crew are.

Tom declines to speak, and she understands it, but at least one hundred of the crew do. And all of them laugh, and all of them cry. And all of them learn, suddenly, to let her be. That life will be hard, but it will keep going on. Joe Carey says she was the best engineer he’d ever known, and Seven agrees.

It is Chakotay who leads the final salute, with Tom at his side. He calls her his sister, and his words make Janeway weep. She doesn’t turn away like she would have in the past; there is no likelihood of them getting home soon, and she knows her world is the people on this ship. She has to open up to it.

And when she settles on the couch later, to read Dante’s _Inferno_ , it is with a peace she has been missing not only for a week, but for a very long time.

 She only gets through a verse when the door chimes.

“Come in.”

 She’s not surprised to see Tom, and she’s prepared herself to spend time with him in these next few months, but this early on wasn’t what she necessarily expected.

 “May I?”

She nods to the seat beside her, “I think in this context, we’ll drop any adherences to protocol.”

 “I am glad,” he murmurs cryptically, “because that will make this easier.”

She doesn’t understand what he means, but she smiles politely anyway.

 “What are you reading?”

 “Dante’s _Inferno_ ,” she answers, holding up the copy. “It’s a memento of another life.”

 “You’ve had a few of those,” he states. “I didn’t realise.”

 She grins dryly.

 “I want to tell you something,” he says, wringing his fingers. “And I need you to listen, and not speak, until I’m finished.”

 Wholly unaccustomed to taking orders from her helmsman, she bristles at first, but then remembers that she was the one to drop their roles when he seeks her out for counsel. She supposes this informality is part and parcel of that unwritten agreement, and things will be off-colour for a while; he’s grieving – they all are – and he will need to be angry and assertive sometimes.

 “B’Elanna loved three people on this ship. She loved me, and Harry and Chakotay. She cared deeply about you, she liked Neelix. But we were the people she loved. She worried about Harry, sometimes. She worried about Chakotay all the time.” He looks at her, and she suddenly realises what he’s about to say. “She used to say he was lost until he met you. That he fucked and killed anything that moved, and was so angry until he met you. That you gave him purpose.”

 She holds up a hand, terrified, “Tom -”

 “You promised,” he says quietly.

 She swallows her mounting protest and he continues;

 “And that he loved you.” He finally looks at her. “And she used to say you loved him too. At first I had a betting pool on when you would get together. She told me it was crap and made me shut it down. This was long before we were together by the way. And we argued because I was pissed she made me shut it down. She got so angry at me, and told me your pain wasn’t something to bet on, or his. It made me fall in love with her. She was so...genuine. She told me you couldn’t be with him, because you were afraid, and you were right to be afraid but stupid too. And she was right. Wasn’t she?”

 Kathryn is so blind-sided by it that she can barely answer. And just for a moment she is so embarrassed that she wants to kill him.

 “I know she was right, because I’ve seen it. I’ve watched him, I’ve watched you. I know he loves you. And I think you love him?”

 She does not answer.

 “Anyway -” he continues, relentless, “my point is that I just lost the woman I loved, the woman who made me better and happier and more alive. And yet you’re denying yourself that, and him that, for whatever reason.”

 He pauses, as if she’s going to fill the space. When she doesn’t, he grimaces.

“You told me you cling on every day. For what, if it isn’t to be loved? We’ve no guarantee of getting home. All that’s guaranteed to us is the next minute. And do you know what B’Elanna taught me, that day she lost her shit about my betting pool? That kindness was as important as laughter. And I want to be kind, and my first act of kindness is telling you your crew would be delighted if you finally got together, and that Justin and all your past shit shouldn’t hold you back from being happy. And that you’ll only ever regret what you didn’t have. I don’t regret B’Elanna, you don’t regret Justin. Why would Chakotay be any different?”

Again, she is so stunned her only answer is silence. He stands up and brushes his hands against his thighs. The sound of the motion on dry material seems amplified in the space between them.

“So that’s what I wanted to say. I wanted to say that, and I wanted to know if B’Elanna was right.” 

She watches him turn to go, as if in slow motion. 

“She was,” she says, the words barely a whisper.

“I know.”

 


End file.
